A Love Letter to Star Trek
This is too soon to write this. I should wait a few months, maybe a year, take time and coffee and dreams and let it finish whirling around my neural net. But Star Trek is all about the temporal anomalies so here I sit.
One year and a couple months ago, on Star Date something-or-other, my sons and I started a family tradition by accident. We rented the first disk of what seemed like an endless set of Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs. When Star Trek played in real life I was busy trying to make a dead-end marriage work and my two young sons didn't exist. I didn't watch television then, but if I had, I wouldn't have watched a sci-fi soap opera about humans and aliens chasing time.
I don't remember those early shows now. All I remember is watching three boys huddled under a navy blue crocheted afghan, mouths open, eyes krazy-glued to the small screen in our sunroom while reflected images of people with ridged skulls and pointed ears flickered on three glass corner windows. They were hooked.
I made microwave popcorn and poured it into an orange bucket and added extra melted butter, this was our ritual once I put the parrot to bed, and the dog and cat would sleep on the couch between us, while my oldest son manned the remote control. I never suspected it would become part of our life like brushing teeth and doing homework. That first disk rental was a lark. But the first became the second, then the third, and a month later we were well into the first season and I began to hear my two youngest sons discuss the finer points of antimatter during waking hours and every chipped saucer in the cupboard became an inpromptu model of the Enterprise star ship.
I can't explain the hold it had on my sons, and then on me. I don't remember the episodes the way they do. I'm sitting here crying while I type this, searching for a way to tell you how it transformed them into something a little bit better, how they started recognizing the world news for the first time and asking me when would our people stop fighting, start working together as one planet - simple ideas, good ideas, too simple for people who crave power. One day, a bad bad day, when many soldiers lost lives in that distant senseless war, my middle son stood with barefeet on the cold tile floor of the kitchen, listening to NPR, and clenched his fists in frustration.
"Why don't they stop fighting? We're never going to join a Federation of Planets if this continues. Don't they know that? Why don't they want to help end starvation instead? I wish we lived in the future."
I wished we lived in that future, too, where replicators created gourmet meals and women wore flowing tunics and held important positions, and no wars raged on planet Earth because starvation was a memory from some other sick place and time. I loved that my sons saw this, wanted a future of space travel and social justice.
I bought my sons Star Trek uniform shirts and my youngest wore his every day. I had to wash it each night and have it on his bed every morning so that he became a Star Fleet cadet in his secret mind as he sat at a small wooden desk and counted on fingers in school. He begged me to tell Santa to bring him an Enterprise and a Wesley Crusher action figure for Christmas, and in the weeks leading up to the holiday I crossed my fingers and bid on star ships and space men at eBay.
The week before Christmas brought flu to my house. Everyone but me became feverish and listless. I was terrified. The news was filled with reports of children dying of flu, and I kept vigil with cold compresses and Tylenol and warm broth. We didn't watch Star Trek this week, my sons could not leave bed, and I made noise with jingle bells in the living room and stomped my feet and ran into my sons' room, two Star Trek action figures in hand, whooping and laughing that Santa stopped by a few days early to drop off a pre-Christmas present because they were so so good this year. My youngest barely smiled, he was so ill, but he grabbed his Wesley Crusher and placed him on his chest. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, the ten-year-old girl next door died unexpectedly of flu. She played at my house every day for three years. She loved my boys and my dog and my middle son hid with her in the loft above the garage, pretending to be the President. We grieved terribly over the holiday, and my youngest carried his new Enterprise from room to room, still feverish, so lost and afraid. They can cure people instantly in Star Trek, with little metal boxes swirled above a sick body, but in this day and time only luck and grace and sparse science make decisions. I tried to explain this to my boys but they didn't understand.
Something about the mythology, the space, the ongoing conundrums of time, kept my sons going, kept them full of hope. They started reading books about the solar system. They followed the NASA mission to Mars and knew more about it than their teachers. They built star ships of blankets and chairs in the sunroom and spent lazy Saturday afternoons playing with styrofoam planets. All peaceful, all scientific and humane. Children from the future.
The last season of Star Trek came too fast. We watched the last episode last night. My boys have grown tall and already those Star Trek shirts are getting tight. They look forward to renting Deep Space Nine episodes. I look forward to it, too, but my heart knows this time is over, no anomalies can bring it back.
9 and 7 on the couch in those Star Trek shirts
10:31:38 PM 
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